They taught Pascal in high school, for my AP Computer Science course. We used Turbo Pascal on PS/2 model 30's. There were no hard drives in the machines! The teacher handed out floppies at the start of the class. By that point, I already knew C but it was still fun learning a new language.
Turbo Pascal Turns 40
41–50 of 271 posts
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#42They taught Pascal in high school, for my AP Computer Science course. We used Turbo Pascal on PS/2 model 30's. There were no hard drives in the machines! The teacher handed out floppies at the start of the class. By that point, I already knew C but it was still fun learning a new language.
One of my favorite vintage PCs is my PS/2 Model 30, and I had no idea it was available in a dual floppy configuration! It seems way too late to have been sold that way, but yup, checks out, that was the bare-bones configuration.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#43In high school I thought "structured programming" would cramp my style. I'd spend hours with BASICA printouts spread out over the floor, tracing through chains of GOTOs to find my bugs.
One day my dad brought home Turbo Pascal so I gave it a shot. I wrote Conway's Game of Life, and was shocked when it ran correctly the first time. Never wrote another line of BASICA.
Much later I turned pro and moved on to other languages, but my dad kept messing around with Pascal until he was in his 70s.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#44Turbo Pascal was the first "real" programming language I learned past 6809E ASM, structured basic flavors and batch/shell back in the very late 80s. When I went to college for CS in the early 90s, they were still teaching the first year of classes in Borland Pascal so that turned out to be very useful experience.
A few years later, my Pascal background sailed me into a half-decade stint as a custom app dev working with Delphi. That, in turn, led to a job at Borland testing the Kylix and C++Builder IDEs. Good times.
I still miss Delphi. Nowadays it's normal to have IDE plugins to the point it's a dealbreaker if they don't exist. But at the time the idea of a component library and coding environment that was easily extensible in its own language was pure magic. I had so much fun playing with both VCL and the IDE itself.
It's a shame Borland left the grassroots devs behind in their quest for the enterprise market, and more or less killed any growth in community adoption. It was a really cool setup, at least through Delphi 7 or so.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#45They taught Pascal in high school, for my AP Computer Science course. We used Turbo Pascal on PS/2 model 30's. There were no hard drives in the machines! The teacher handed out floppies at the start of the class. By that point, I already knew C but it was still fun learning a new language.
One of my favorite vintage PCs is my PS/2 Model 30, and I had no idea it was available in a dual floppy configuration! It seems way too late to have been sold that way, but yup, checks out, that was the bare-bones configuration.
Yes, it was pretty odd! This was around 1992 or 1993, so long after the PS/2 was even released.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#46In high school I thought "structured programming" would cramp my style. I'd spend hours with BASICA printouts spread out over the floor, tracing through chains of GOTOs to find my bugs. One day my dad brought home Turbo Pascal so I gave it a shot. I wrote Conway's Game of Life, and was shocked when it ran correctly the first time. Never wrote another line of BASICA. Much later I turned pro and moved on to other langu…
> was shocked when it ran correctly the first time
This overall "if it compiles it works" philosophy is quite common among Pascal-family languages, and derived languages like Ada. Though there is also PL/I if you want a language with a loosely Pascalish syntax that relies on the complete opposite design style - the one that was carried over to C and its derivatives.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#47I learned Pascal in highschool the last year they taught it before switching to Java! I remember the textbook we used had a Dune themed question/problem to solve which was delightfully nerdy compared to the corporate OOP blandness of Java
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#48When I was a kid, a kindly computer store owner (who also made me a great deal on an PC-semi-compatible running MS-DOS 1.25, for approx. a hundred lawns mowed and babies sat) sold me a copy of Turbo Pascal for generic MS-DOS (no PC BIOS assumed) on 8" floppy. He transferred it to the 160KB 5.25" format that my semi-compatible used. I hope I was appreciative enough at the time, as I am now. That helped bootstrap my ca…
Okay, I'll bite :) What's this "PC-semi-compatible" of which you speak?
Interesting question... based on DOS 1.25, I can't imagine there are many choices. (Maybe the earliest Compaq machines among them).
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#49Never wrote a line of code in Turbo Pascal afterward, but taking it in HS (somewhat on accident) in 1995 was what set the trajectory for the rest of my life.
Same here. Even now, I still sometimes set my vim colors to blue background and yellow/white text.
I used blue/yellow in Emacs until I bought a laptop with a glossy screen in 2011. Now it's grey/yellow. Some habits die hard.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#5025 seconds to compile it? How come ?
Also, Pascal is a direct descendant of a very, very old language (ALGOL-58 from 1958). In the 1950s, HLL compilation was at the extreme edge of what computers were capable of doing and a key goal of language design was (or should have been - cough COBOL cough) to make it as efficient as possible.
By the time Ken Thompson was designing languages, hardware had improved a lot and he could make compilation efficiency a lower priority.